You can’t help but mention the £115m Chelsea paid to sign Moises Caicedo every time you talk about him. It’s inevitable. If you sign a player for a record fee, it’s going to end up tied to them, no matter how many times that record is broken subsequently.
That’s what Chelsea knew they were getting in to when they bent to Brighton’s every demand for the midfielder, and that’s inevitably why every performance that isn’t at least an 8 out of 10 leads to serious scrutiny.
In an ideal world, of course, every player would be judged on their individual game of course, but even Mauricio Pochettino, speaking in his press conference yesterday, acknowledged it’s not that simple:
“It’s easy now to blame the money, it’s easy to blame different aspects. He is a human being. When something is covered in expectation, then [people] find something to blame. But it’s a process, it’s normal. For him it’s tough also, but for everyone, the expectation is different. The shirt is different, the badge is different, the context is different, the teammates are different, different club, everything is different. It’s about time to fit and to start to perform.”
Tomorrow’s game against his old club is a superb chance for Caicedo to shine, of course. The problem is that when you pay record money you expect record performances, and he’s going to have to be a star week in, week out for his team to start to pay off that money – which is unfair on the Ecuador star, but also inevitable.
